Eddy, sober now, looks sharply at Anna. Rosie turns to him. ‘Was it you, Eddy? Did you tell him to pay for the shag he couldn’t get from his frigid wife?’
‘Ro, no, please don’t—’
‘Tell me!’
‘I had no idea, Rosie. I think what he’s done is disgusting, I do. There’s no excuse. I’m ashamed of him.’
Rosie looks at him, sees the way he squirms away from meeting her eye, the way Anna is frowning at Eddy, and she realizes there’s no love here, not between any of them. There can’t be with all this anger and mistrust.
‘What kind of friends are you?’ She pulls her arm from Anna’s, moving away from them both.
‘Rosie, we need to keep going, please, you’re freezing …’
‘I’m not going with you.’
‘What?’ Eddy glances nervously at Anna.
‘I don’t want to be near you. Either of you.’
‘Rosie, come on, that’s a bit dramatic …’
‘Don’t you fucking dare call me dramatic!’ Rosie’s voice is a shriek. ‘You came into my house, Eddy, you were with my kids, and all the while you knew what he’d done and you said
Eddy looks at the ground.
‘Anna, you could have told me on my own. You could at least have let me have that.’
Anna starts crying, which makes Rosie want to scream in her face, but instead she says, ‘Tell Seb I’ll get a room at the Travelodge. Tell him I don’t want to see him. That I’ll come home tomorrow. When I’m ready.’ She takes out her phone and searches for the number for the hotel.
‘Rosie, it’s late, you don’t have any stuff … There might not be a room …’
But someone, thank God, answers and her voice only shakes a little as she asks, ‘Oh, hi there, please can you let me know if you have a room available for tonight?’
She lets Anna and Eddy walk her the short distance to the hotel, but she won’t talk, won’t answer any of their questions. Eddy reluctantly takes his coat back as Rosie goes to get her key. The receptionist smirks at her wild hair, her running make-up, and Rosie smirks back, emboldened by the drama of it all. As the door clicks shut behind her in her small, blank room Rosie’s heart fills with pain and suddenly she realizes it was always there. This feeling, the subtle vibration that she was being lied to, that she’d tried to ignore for so long. But now there’s no hiding because there’s no one she can call, no one who can help. She’s alone with it now and all she can do is climb into the tightly made bed, curl up into a ball and let herself go.
Her phone wakes her, rattling on the table next to her head. Seeing it’s Anna, she doesn’t answer, but then a few seconds later the phone in her room starts ringing. Her children flash into her heart and with a heavy arm she lifts the receiver.
‘Good morning, it’s reception.’
It’s immediately clear from the receptionist’s chirpy tone that none of her children are in hospital or in danger.
‘Hi.’ Rosie’s voice is gruff from her night of crying.
‘Just to let you know that your friend is here and she’s … oh, hold on …’
On the other end, Rosie can hear Anna saying, ‘Tell her I don’t need to come up, tell her I’m only here to drop off a bag of stuff for her …’
‘She says she has a—’
Rosie cuts her off. ‘Can you leave the bag outside my room, please?’
And then she hangs up.
She thinks of her children. Panics that they’ll be worrying and feels herself harden against her own sorrow. She looks for her phone on the bedside table, but as soon as she picks it up, the battery goes dead.
She urgently wants to know the time so she can place her children in their Sunday morning, know whether Greer has had a good breakfast and if Heath will be out playing football already; will Sylvie be back, exhausted from her sleepover? Or will they be collapsed, sobbing, trying to understand what’s going on, why Rosie isn’t home? She opens her room door and there is Anna’s favourite overnight bag. She pulls it inside and rifles through it, ignoring a handwritten note, clothes and toiletries until she finds a phone charger.
As soon as her phone is plugged in, it lights up with a call. Seb. She pauses but the pull towards her children is even greater than her rage. She answers, ‘Seb,’ just as her son in his high voice says, ‘Mummy?’
Rosie’s heart somersaults and before she’s even said anything, he starts crying. As he sobs, she can’t help but lie to him: ‘It’s OK, my love, it’s all going to be OK.’
When he calms a little, he asks, ‘What’s happening, Mum, where are you?’ But Heath’s never been good at waiting for anything, so before she can answer he says, ‘Dad was standing in the garden this morning – I watched him. He’d been crying, Mum. He couldn’t stop. He said you’d had a row, that you would be back soon.’ Now Heath’s started talking, his words avalanche. ‘He keeps crying, Mum, I don’t know why. He’s let us watch TV for ages, which never, ever happens. He said he’d talk to us later, when you’re home and things are a bit clearer, so can you come back? Please. We just need to know what’s going on.’